Luis Borges Best Quotes & Sayings

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. — Jorge Luis Borges

Life itself is a quotation. — Jorge Luis Borges

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects. — Jorge Luis Borges

Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man. — Jorge Luis Borges

People speak generally of a plain style and an elaborate style. I think this is wrong, because what is important ... is that poetry should be living ... — Jorge Luis Borges

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists. — Jorge Luis Borges

I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up; it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same. — Jorge Luis Borges

Misery requires paradises lost — Jorge Luis Borges

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a saying that only the man who has already committed a crime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erroneous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it. — Jorge Luis Borges

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature. — Jorge Luis Borges

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. — Jorge Luis Borges

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. — Jorge Luis Borges

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line
does me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless. — Jorge Luis Borges

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. — Jorge Luis Borges

God has created nights well-populated
with dreams, crowded with mirror images,
so that man may feel that he is nothing more
than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. — Jorge Luis Borges

What a writer wants to do is not what he does. — Jorge Luis Borges

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel. — Jorge Luis Borges

Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today's newspaper. — Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. — Jorge Luis Borges

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. — Jorge Luis Borges

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. — Jorge Luis Borges

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing. — Jorge Luis Borges

In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word? — Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. — Jorge Luis Borges

A writer's work is the product of laziness. — Jorge Luis Borges

Image is sorcery. — Jorge Luis Borges

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight. — Jose Luis Borges

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also. — Jorge Luis Borges

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood. — Jorge Luis Borges

The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past. — Jorge Luis Borges

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself — Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death . — Jorge Luis Borges

Azevedo Bandeira is an expert in the art of progressive intimidation, in the satanic maneuver of gradually humiliating his interlocutor by combining verities and gibes. — Jorge Luis Borges

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. — Jorge Luis Borges

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus. — Jorge Luis Borges